Facebook’s courtyard, with company motto.

Facebook, Twitter, and Paying for the Internet

An annotated index

If you’re committing career suicide, best to leave an extensive note.

This week my tell-all memoir Chaos Monkeys is published by HarperCollins. Having founded a company acquired by Twitter, which I immediately abandoned for an early role on Facebook’s Ads team, only to once again return to Twitter after a tumultuous time at FB, I’ve decided to set down on paper (real, not metaphorical) my time inside the Silicon Valley washing machine. Since I’m violating both written and unwritten codes of silence around divulging the often dark inner workings of these tech behemoths, as well as Valley hangers-on like investors, I have every expectation of being completely unemployable for the foreseeable future. If you jump into the abyss, you jump headlong.

Here’s a sample of the book’s index, complete with marginal (in both senses of the word) commentary. Click on the asterisk to the right and mouse over the note to highlight the entry in question; then, scroll to the bottom of the piece and click “see all responses” for the full set. Bolded entries are the ones with annotations.

To those mentioned who feel I misconstrued events, either in this index or Chaos Monkeys itself: I invite you to write your own competing account. Together we may arrive at the set of mutually agreed-upon lies called history.

Note: Some names have been omitted to protect the truly guilty.

Badros, Greg, 3, 410, 454, 457
Bain, Adam, 184, 188–90, 203, 478–79, 494
Baker Scholar, 110
Bakshy, Eytan, 368
bar-code reading, 51
batch, 105
Battles, Matt, 430
Beacon, 335
bedroom communities, 338
beer and diapers, 363
Beltway Boomers, 385
Belushi, John, 399
Best Buy, 328
best effort, 418
beta products, 44
Bezos, Jeff, 428
Big Brother, 384, 402
Bin Laden, Osama, 384
birth, 59–60
black-hat hackers, 314
Blackwell, Trevor, 60
Boland, Brian, 382, 398
first meeting, 3–4
in great debate, 459–61
on integration, 443
middle manager, 463–64
reporting to, 277
seducing, 408
slides, 7–8
stripping of duties, 452
Bolshevism, 356
boot camp, 269
Bosworth, Andrew (“Boz”), 2, 444–46, 457–60, 473–74
Boyd, John, 436, 437
The Boy Kings (Losse), 445
brand advertising, 39–40
Brazil, 377–78
Brazil, Alan, 22–23
British Trader
babies, 58–59, 170, 304–5
child support to, 306–7
family, 84
meeting, 54–56
relationship, 165, 168, 245
Brogramming, 400

Graham, Paul (“PG”)
advice, 231
essay, 46–47, 52–53
first meeting, 90
genius guru, 98
meeting with, 60–62
mythologies, 99

harassment, 66–68
Hart, Camille, 4–5
hashing, 387
hate speech, 315
Hemingway, Ernest, 106
Herodotus, 421
Herzl, Theodor, 496
Hoffman, Reid, 88
hogrammers, 400
home-brewing, 406

Palihapitiya, Chamath, 265–66
Palo Alto
bosom of,
116 climate, 123
downtown, 333, 338
East, 404

personally identifiable information (PII), 395
PMMess, 347–51, 407, 409
poker playing, 396–97
polyandry, 483
Polybius, 172, 316, 336
Pong, 150
Ponzi scheme, 16
pornography, 167, 262, 268, 312, 314, 315
pregnancy, 58–59

product managers (PMs)
as Afghan warlords, 273
earning money, 302
everyday work, 294
Facebook, 4, 6–7, 10, 91, 97, 202, 210, 271–79
Google, 192
habitat, 341
high-value, 246
ideal, 219
information and, 295
internal and external forces and, 316–17
last on buck-passing chain, 327
managing, 276
stupidity, 313
tech companies, 272
tiebreaker role, 292

Rabkin, Mark, 3, 312, 389, 398, 435
Rajaram, Gokul, 8, 10
accepting offer from, 248
banter with, 472–73
as boss, 3
bribery, 471
go big or go home ethos, 300
in great debate, 459
influence, 202
insubordination toward, 465
interview with, 221–22
leadership, 309
loss of trust, 468
lot with, 373
management of, 434
middle manager, 463–64
one-on-one and, 469
as product leader, 276–77
stripping of duties, 452

Ralston, Geoff, 93
Rapportive, 96–97, 106
real-time bidding (RTB), 40–41
real-time data synchronization, 38
Red Rock Coffee, 84
RedLaser, 51
Reesman, Ben, 308, 389, 399–400, 475, 477
relativity, 25
replicating portfolio, 247–48
retargeting, 9, 381, 395, 438, 461
return of advertising spend (ROAS), 81
revenue dashboards, 274–75, 295–96
The Road Warrior, 134
Roetter, Alex, 185, 190, 493–94
romantic liaisons, 55–56
Romper Stomper, 202
Rosenblum, Rich, 21–22
Rosenn, Itamar, 368
Rosenthal, Brian, 389, 390
Ross, Blake, 444
Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, 303
rounds, 156
routing system, 324
Rubinstein, Dan, 312–13
Ruby on Rails, 155
Russia, 375–76

Sacca, Chris, 128, 141, 143
acquisition advice, 187–88, 212–13, 245–47
on deals, 205–7
ignoring inquiries, 201
pseudoangel, 113, 117–19
wisdom, 202
safe sex, 58
sailboat living, 307, 332, 337–38

Sandberg, Sheryl, 2, 10
data joining and, 465
gatekeeper, 4–5
intimates, 3–4
leadership, 410
managerial prowess, 311–13
meetings, 371, 382, 459
PowerPoint and, 7
recommendations to, 462
schmoozing, 367
wiles of, 408
sausage grinder, 296
Scalps@Facebook, 314
scavenging foray, 116
schadenfreude, 16–17
Schopenhauer, Arthur, 282
Schrage, Elliot, 3–4, 410
Schreier, Bryan, 123–25
Schrock, Nick, 400
Schroepfer, Mike, 2
Schultz, Alex, 374
scientific racism, 122
Scoble, Robert, 100
Scott, George C., 24, 369
security, 314–15
seed money, 96
Sequoia, 122–25, 130, 159
severance package, 470–71
severity-level-one bug (SEV1), 323
sexual molestation, 17

Simo, Fidji, 348, 483
single-trigger acceleration, 254
skulduggery, 69, 229
social mediation, 496
social mission, 257
social plugins, 6–9
The Social Network, 282, 288, 333
software
ad-blocking, 325
Adchemy, 43
analytics, 448
building, 47, 155
bundling, 149–50
chaos monkey, 103
conversion-tracking, 222
development, 455
enterprise, 153
speed eating, 21
Sponsored Stories, 280, 365, 367, 369–70, 444
Spotify, 362, 364–65
SQL write command, 323
Square, 464
stack, 439
Stanford, Leland, 121

Tai, Bill, 126–28
Taleb, Nassim Nicholas, 197
targeting
ability, 393
accountability and, 39
ads, 4, 7, 274, 280, 299, 320, 323, 398, 402, 412, 440, 479
clusters, 395
data, 318, 485
defined, 274
Facebook, 321, 362, 368, 438, 442
functionality, 327
hashtags, 293, 295
magic, 10
political, 302
quirks, 477
retargeting, 9, 381, 395, 438, 461
running, 459–60
segments, 292, 295, 322, 385, 423, 452
teams, 276, 296, 301, 346, 390, 401, 452
topics, 296
tech boom, 121, 181, 336, 495
tech bubble, 155, 181, 224, 247
tech companies

TechCrunch, 43, 175, 255
technical debt, 455
Technofuturism, 356
technolibertarians, 491
technology. See also software
development, 294
Internet advertising, 429, 446, 454
Silicon Valley, 294
TellApart, 426
Tesla, 241–43, 339
texting, 161, 490–91
Thau, Kevin, 202, 245, 249
third-party data, 390, 423, 440, 484
This Old House, 56
Thompson, Hunter S., 241
Tillman, Matt, 241–43
Timberlake, Justin, 333
Time magazine, 287
Tinder, 103
track racing, 344–45
Trada, 83
Tretola, Dan, 349
TriplePoint Capital, 129, 143–44
truth, 457–58
Turn, 390
Twain, Mark, 66

Wall Street
bonuses, 27
pursuit of gain, 23–24
Silicon Valley paralleling, 27
traders, 89

Wall Street Journal, 261, 325, 354

Walmart, 49, 96, 349, 385
Wang, Ted, 138–39, 145–46, 152, 192
Warhol, Andy, 261

Washington Post, 364
Webster, Daniel, 14
Weil, Kevin, 190, 478–79, 481
first meeting, 185–88
reporting to, 234
second meeting, 238
in Twitter shake-up, 493–94

Weinstein, Scott, 29–31
WhatsApp, 490–91
Whereoscope, 202
Wiesel, Elie, 16
Wiesel, Elisha, 16
Wi-Fi, 339
Williams, Ev, 177, 183, 196
Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, 134
Windows, 47, 286
Winklevoss twins, 151

Zeitgeist, 29–30
zero-sum game, 230, 319
Zoufonoun, Amin, 209–11, 213, 225–26
Zuckerberg, Mark (“Zuck”)
advertising knowledge, 393–94
on clown car, 428–29
company-wide Q&A, 348–49
on connected world, 285
court of, 444
declaring Lockdown, 287–89
e-mail from, 353
throne, 371

Excerpted from Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley, published by HarperCollins on June 28, 2016. Available for purchase at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, or your local independent bookseller.